Opinion Being Draco Malfoy — from Harry Potter villain to China’s new year mascot

There is a Chinese poem whose title is translated as ‘Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den’. The hyphen is crucial — the poet munches on lions, not vice versa. It’s all in how it’s written, and that goes 100 times for the original Chinese version, which goes “Shishi shi shi shi shi…” When read aloud, it’s incomprehensible because every syllable is “shi”. This is possible because Chinese has many different words that, over time, have come to be pronounced the same. The poem was composed to show how difficult it can be to understand literary Chinese without Chinese characters. The characters are useful because they represent meaning and not just sound, and therefore different ones are used for different words even if they are pronounced the same.

It’s because Chinese characters have meanings that Draco Malfoy, a character himself (from Harry Potter), has become associated with the upcoming Chinese new year, the start of the year of the horse. In Chinese, Malfoy’s name is written with the characters “ma er fu” to approximate the sound. But the actual meaning of the characters is “horse fortune”. Reportedly, this has made him an unofficial mascot of the coming year in China, with fanart, memes and merchandise springing up everywhere. There are even images of Tom Felton, who played Malfoy in the films, riding a horse; for his part, Malfoy might be relieved it’s a horse and not a hippogriff, the magical creature that injures him in the story.

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Malfoy became a fan favourite when the films came out thanks to Felton’s looks and was often whitewashed in fanfiction. He is an antagonist, however, and even his name has a nastier meaning in French: “Bad faith”. Does this make him irredeemable? That would be putting the cart before the horse.